Patrick Collinson

Patrick "Pat" Collinson (10 August 1929 – 28 September 2011) was an English historian, known as a writer on the Elizabethan era, particularly Elizabethan Puritanism. He was emeritus Regius Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge, having occupied the chair from 1988 to 1996. He once described himself as "an early modernist with a prime interest in the history of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries."

Life Collinson was born in Ipswich, the son of Cecil Collinson and Belle Hay Patrick. His father came from a Yorkshire Quaker family, and both Patrick's parents were Christian missionaries. He later wrote that his childhood home was "an evangelical hothouse where the Second Coming was expected daily". Before he was 20, he was baptised at Bethesda Chapel in Ipswich.

After a short spell at Bethany School in Goudhurst, Kent, and Huntingdon Grammar School, Collinson was educated at King's Ely, and Pembroke College, Cambridge from 1949 to 1952. He was also trained as a radar mechanic during his national service in the Royal Air Force.

Collinson was a lecturer at the University of Khartoum, and from 1961 assistant lecturer in ecclesiastical history at King's College London (where he taught Desmond Tutu). In 1960 he married Elizabeth Albinia Susan Selwyn, a nurse. He thought about becoming an Anglican minister but in the end chose not to. In 1979 he delivered the Ford Lectures at the University of Oxford, taking as his subject "The religion of Protestants: the church in English society, 1559–1625". In 1981 he delivered the Birkbeck Lecture in Ecclesiastical History at the University of Cambridge. He was President of the Ecclesiastical History Society (1985-86). He was chair of modern history at the University of Sheffield from 1984 to 1988 before he succeeded Sir Geoffrey Elton as Cambridge Regius Professor of History, where his attempt to reform the tripos failed due to opposition from within; his inaugural lecture was entitled "De Republica Anglorum: Or, History with the Politics Put Back." Collinson was the founding president of the society in 1991.

Collinson's political views were left-wing; he was a republican and a supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. A Mirror of Elizabethan Puritanism: The Life and Letters of Godly Master Dering (London: Dr. Wiliams's Trust, 1964) search online The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Methuen, 1967) read online Archbishop Grindal, 1519–1583: The Struggle for a Reformed Church (London: J. Cape, 1979) search online read online (2021 edition: ) The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625, Ford Lectures, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982) search online English Puritanism (London: Historical Association, 1983) search online read online Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London: Hambledon Press, 1983) search online read online The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: The Third Anstey Memorial Lectures in the University of Kent at Canterbury, 12–15 May 1986 (Macmillan, 1988) search online Andrew Perne: Quartercentenary Studies: Patrick Collinson, David McKitterick, Elisabeth Leedham-Green, edited by David McKitterick (Cambridge University Library, 1991) search online Elizabethan Essays (London: Hambledon Press, 1994) search online A History of Canterbury Cathedral, edited by Patrick Collinson, Nigel Ramsay, and Margaret Sparks (Oxford University Press, 1995) search online Belief and Practice in Reformation England: A Tribute to Patrick Collinson from His Students, edited by Susan Wabuda and Caroline Litzenberger) (Aldershot, Hants, 1998) search online Short Oxford History of the British Isles: The Sixteenth Century (editor) (Oxford University Press, 2002) review Lady Margaret Beaufort and Her Professors of Divinity at Cambridge: 1502 to 1649 (Cambridge University Press, 2003) read online Elizabethans (London: Hambledon and London, 2003) search online read online The Reformation: A History (Modern Library, 2003) read online Elizabeth I (Very Interesting People Series, 2007) read online From Cranmer to Sancroft: Essays on English Religion in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007) read online The Reception of Continental Reformation in Britain, edited by Polly Ha and Patrick Collinson (Oxford University Press, 2010) search online read online The History of a History Man; Or, the Twentieth Century Viewed from a Safe Distance: The Memoirs of Patrick Collinson (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2011) (Church of England Record Society Series). . review review Richard Bancroft and Elizabethan Anti-Puritanism (Cambridge University Press, 2013) review